Oh hey there, Laurel! Hey Yanny. Thanks for showing up and making my head want to explode. Up until you came around I’d been living my life, happily believing that reality was actually a thing, but now I know better. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go give THIS a listen, then listen to it with several of your closest friends, then burst into tears or read some Ayn Rand or stare vacantly into space for a little while.) The whole “what color is the dress” thing didn’t bother me so much. I’m not really sure why, except that I’ve just always kind of figured that we see things slightly differently. And we’ve all seen enough optical illusions in our lives to know that images frequently play tricks on our eyes. I accept that we see things differently, but I guess it’s harder for me to believe that we really, actually, literally hear things differently.

In my previous state of happy naivete, I had assumed that when presented with a piece of evidence, everyone would observe that piece of evidence and they would smile understandingly at one another and say “Ah, yes, we’re all on the same page now. Wonderful.” But now Laurel and Yanny have showed up and shattered that illusion for me. Just suppose that the Laurel/Yanny audio recording was somehow required as evidence in a trial. Suppose some poor intern (let’s name him Hubert) was told to send an email containing sensitive information to one of his superiors, and for some reason the instructions came as a digitally created recording and Hubert ended up sending the email to Yanny in marketing instead of to Laurel in accounting. And then Yanny, who wasn’t too bright, used the information contained in that email in an inappropriate way, thus leading to an enormous lawsuit (and this brilliantly hypothetical trial). What happens when Hubert’s lawyer says “Well, ladies and gentlemen, lucky for us, we have obtained a copy of that recording!” and then he plays it for everyone and half the jury hears Laurel and half the jury hears Yanny?? What happens when something that ought to be objective turns out to be subjective?

Now, as far as I’m concerned, the voice is quite clearly saying Laurel. I can’t even a tiny bit hear anything approximating Yanny. I was starting to believe that anyone who claimed they heard Yanny was lying (this includes roughly half the people I know), until my mom told me that she listened to it the other day, heard the name “Laurel” being repeated, and then heard my dad (who had no knowledge of this debate at the time) ask from the other room “Why are you listening to someone say ‘Tammy’ over and over again?…Oh wait, it’s Yanny.” Apparently, when it comes to my willingness to believe that the people close to me are liars, I draw the line at my dad.

If people are ACTUALLY hearing Yanny instead of Laurel, then this world is a nonsense world and nothing is real, because this is not just theoretical, “we all have our own perspectives” stuff. This isn’t the advice you get in premarital counseling where you read generic anecdotes of newlywed couples having droll little misunderstandings where he says “I’m hungry” and she hears “Why haven’t you made dinner yet?” This is concrete, science fiction voodoo in which we are not just hearing different meanings behind the words but we are actually hearing different words. I know, I know, there are explanations for this phenomenon. I know that it’s (probably) not science fiction voodoo. But if it’s possible to listen to the same thing and actually hear different things, then is it any wonder that we misunderstand and judge each other when it comes to more abstract concepts? Is it any wonder that marriages are hard, that people experience conflict in the workplace, that conservatives and liberals think so differently about things? Plenty often, our difficulties arise from the fact that people are actually selfish, that someone made a bad choice or behaved in a way that was objectively wrong. But sometimes, perhaps one person simply heard Laurel and the other heard Yanny, and both things are true.

Let’s say, for instance, that my husband and I have a tiny dispute. (This NEVER happens, so this is purely theoretical.) Just for fun, imagine that I look at our calendar and see that he has put company on it for a few days. Wanting to confirm that what I see on the calendar is correct, I say “Hey, what day are our guests coming into town next week?” and he answers “Tuesday.” Based on that brief interaction, it’s not unreasonable to assume that I ought to have the guest room ready on Tuesday, right? But now let’s jump into his brain, where he hears me ask “Hey, what day are our guests {who are staying at an AirBnB} coming into town next week?” When he answers “Tuesday,” he assumes we’re on the same page — that we have friendss coming into town on Tuesday and we will be available to them while they’re here. And when he sees me making up the guest bed and cleaning the guest bathroom, he assumes I’m just doing my thing, cleaning the house for the pure joy of it. (Which….is actually normal.)

If you look up the definition of “guest,” you’ll find these as the first two entries:

a : a person entertained in one’s house

b : a person to whom hospitality is extended